Day 27: La Brea Tar Pits & Hollywood

After a very nice, cool, but not cold night we woke up and packed up easily. We stopped for gas and a quick Hostess breakfast and headed towards Los Angeles. If you have never had anything from Mrs. Hostess, you are missing out, she really knows her way around the gas station pastry display. We were on the freeway for pretty much the whole day. I was surprised at how easy of a day it was, we didn't get beat up too bad on the road, and the traffic gave us space. On the way down we passed many grape fields and the workers were out picking. They have these little hut things that they can move along the vines so they have a table and shade while they work...it was pretty cool. We got down to the Acton, CA KOA to find our site pretty far from the bathrooms. We went in and asked if we could move to the other tent section that was real close to the bathrooms and they said yes. It was first come first serve that night for tents because of a car show at the campgound the next day. We went to the other loop with the intentions of setting up our tent and staking our claim right away only to find that the entire loop was being watered with sprinklers. We had gotten to the campground early (around 1:30pm) in hopes to make it down to LA (about an hour drive) to see the tar pits.(which closed at 5). We obviously couldn't set up the tent in the sprinklers so we found a spot we wanted, parked our trailer nearby, and took off toward LA.

We got moving because we wanted to make it to the Page museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in enough time to enjoy them and see it all. In route, we got gas and chowed down at Mc D's real quick. We were making awesome time until we got into the La Brea area. It was stop and go, and other motorcycles were splitting lanes between the cars. I wanted to go with them, but the bike is too wide for that. It took us about 30 minutes to go 3 miles but we finally made it. We got into the museum and had about 2 hours to see everything.

First we got a student rate (sweet!). The first small exhibit is a skeleton of saber-tooth tiger that would change into a real-life looking one; the lights would come on and create a 3-D effect/illusion of a real one every few seconds. Then we went on to see a buffalo skeleton, very similar to todays buffalo.

 Can you see the mini-B? He really likes buffalo.

They also had a hands on thing where a solid aluminum bar was sticking into a bucket of tar and you had to see how hard it was to pull out, to simulate what it would be like to be stuck in the pits. It was pretty hard to pull on the bars, it'd be a sweet way to die... We saw mastodon and camel skeletons and a wooly mammoth replica & skeleton. They were HUGE.

 Then they had this wall of skulls. They are dire wolf skulls, the number one thing found in the pits. On this wall there are 404 skulls, but there have been over 4,000 individual dire wolf skeletons found in the pits.

After that was a room where you can watch volunteers sift through the tar pit stuff. They were sorting small things like seeds, snails, and insects while we were there. One was cleaning sabre-tooth tiger bones. There are only 2 on staff, the rest are volunteers. They call it the fish bowl:

There is also a small window where you can take a small glimpse into their storage rooms, which stretch on and on to hold their over 1 million bones. They have found lots of animals and one human, a woman.

They had lots of different animal skeletons on display and they were all really neat. After browsing the gift shop we walked around the fenced tar pit outside, complete with fiberglass mammoths (2 outside the pit watching helplessly and one is stuck in the pit). It smelled just like asphalt and bubbled in several places from escaping methane gas.

We weren't far from the Hollywood sign and figured we might as well. We found a quicker and less-traffic way to get to the overlook. There is a very small parking area and it was crowded with people, so Erin jumped off to go take a quick pic but you had to take a small hike to see the sign so she just got back on and we rode off. We got about 50 yards down the road and you could see it just fine so we pulled off. There was nobody there which was nice. I had to stay on the bike, there was no way to safely park it on the dirt incline. Even though it wasn't direct on it was still cool.

The sign is back there...somewhere.

Just trust us...

We came back to the campsite with no problems, and found we were the only ones in that area. We set up camp and Erin did some work while I went to get a very expensive but only okay tasting pizza. We then went to bed...still the only ones tent camping in that area.

Today we traveled 289.5 miles for a total of 7679.4 miles across America